The SZCUF Grant for Novel Approaches to Therapy in Alzheimer's Disease

The SZCUF Grant for Novel Approaches to Therapy in Alzheimer's Disease Award Announcement

The SZCUF Grant for Novel Approaches to Therapy in Alzheimer's Disease aims to encourage novel approaches to therapy for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and while open to individual applicants from both the University of Sydney and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, it has encouraged applications for joint projects from scientists of the two Universities.

The Trustees of the Fund are pleased to announce the
SZCUF Grant for Novel Approaches to Therapy in Alzheimer's Disease

has been awarded to:

Prof. Yuval DorDept of Developmental Biology and Cancer Research, Faculty of Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

In the awarded project, Professors Dor and Glaser and their team aim to find an objective means of diagnosis and monitoring of brain damage in Alzheimer’s disease. They are developing a new approach which will allow for specific, sensitive and quantitative detection of neuronal cell death in blood, using fragments of DNA released from dying neurons. Preliminary results suggest their approach can detect brain cell death in the blood of human patients suffering brain damage after cardiac arrest and in neurodegeneration. In this project, they propose to optimize the assay, examine if it can be used to detect neuronal cell death in mice and humans, and look for neuronal death in blood using mouse models of AD and human patients with AD. The potential outcome of the proposed research is a novel non-invasive method for the detection of neuronal cell death which could transform diagnosis, drug development and treatment in AD.